The Beginning...Again
Well I guess starting from the beginning of my new journey seems like a good place to begin.
Well I had like I said been almost 2 years out from when I started chemo for stage 3 triple negative breast cancer (tnbc). There were no visible signs of cancer after my double mastectomy surgery & my margins were clean & I had finished radiation March of 2018. So I was looking forward to a full year of picking up the pieces & trying to get my head back into my life. I was looking forward to finding my new "normal" whatever the fuck that meant.
However, in February of 2019 I felt a lump/bump under my skin. No one else was able to detect it so I gave it about a week. After a week I became concerned. I knew that I need to schedule my 3 month appointment with my oncologist anyway so I did. During that time this under the skin bump/lump made its presence known by appearing above the skin in the middle of my chest. As soon as my oncologist came back from his seminar I hurried to get in to see him. The fact that bump/lump was pretty small & looked like it might be a cyst even to the dermatologist I saw later gave me hope, but more on that later.
So in my oncologist's office he examined me. He sent me to a dermatologist for an examination & a biopsy. He would later send me for a few scans to determine stage & progression, but I'll get into that later. So off to the dermatologist I went.
The dermatologist saw me the next week did the biopsy & even said that we have to do this to be safe given my history, but it could be nothing. It might just be a cyst. He biopsied it & stitched me up & I was scheduled to come back a week later to remove the stitches & get the results. Little did I know it would just be to have the stitches removed because I would already have my answers.
Before my next appointment the dermatologist called me with the news. My heart sank knowing deep down that this couldn't be good. I hoped I was wrong. He got on the phone & he kindly & caringly let me know that the biopsy results came back positive for breast cancer. Wow. The bitch had returned & quickly in my opinion.
Back to my oncologist's office to have a more in depth discussion. My oncologist let me know it was triple negative metastatic breast cancer & explained why. It had spread to the skin. Scans he sent me for showed that it wasn't in the bones or pelvic & abdomen areas which was great news. However the chest CT gave a more grim picture. It was in the skin (we knew that) for sure, a few lymph nodes (not sure on the exact number) were enlarged, but not very much. There were small spots on my lungs too small to determine if they were cancerous or not. I tried to focus on the positives (yeah I know stage 4 & positive kind of a weird ass thing to say, but I did) that it wasn't in my blood & that it appears we may have caught it before it spread beyond the skin, just in those lymph nodes & that it is treatable. I also had to face the fact this was now no longer curable, but definitely treatable. We talked about treatments, quality of life, etc. Yep I had to face my own mortality...again, but this time it was different...because I have to face that fact daily.
Then I went home & cried, collected myself just enough to tell everyone I needed or wanted to about my diagnosis & then cried off & on for 2 weeks at home. I often kept it pretty together at work.
P
